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big ugly bill
As the US Detains and Deports, Venezuela Reunites Families
A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Aug 05, 2025
In July 2025, the U.S. Congress passed a budget that commits at least $131 billion to expanding detention, deportation, and border militarization. It is the largest immigration enforcement package in modern U.S. history and one that most people are funding without knowing.
Public pension funds, university endowments, and municipal budgets are deeply invested in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) machinery. If you pay into a retirement fund, attend a university, or live in a major city, your money might be helping detain someone. Your tax dollars already are.
The plan triples ICE’s funding, revives the failed border wall project, builds new jails for families, and allocates $10 billion in unregulated funds to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At the same time, up to 17 million people risk losing healthcare and millions of children face losing access to school meals.
These priorities are not accidental. They reflect a political strategy that treats migration as a threat to be neutralized rather than a consequence of U.S. policy. This budget doesn’t just expand infrastructure, it expands a racialized system of surveillance, incarceration, and profit, while shrinking legal protection, due process, and public oversight.
Here’s what the new immigration budget includes:
- $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation—a threefold increase;
- $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers, including for children and families;
- $46.6 billion for border wall construction, which is more than triple what U.S. President Donald Trump spent in his first term;
- $10 billion in unregulated DHS funding to “safeguard the border” without oversight;
- A daily detention capacity of 116,000 human beings, enough to fill a stadium with mothers, students, toddlers, and elders or to disappear the entire population of Lansing, Michigan or Athens, Georgia; and
- An 800 person limit on the number of immigration judges, worsening already record-breaking court backlogs and delaying due process for millions.
ICE Is Everywhere
ICE doesn’t operate alone. It dances with Palantir’s algorithms. It swallows data from school and Department of Motor Vehicles records. It whispers to local cops in sanctuary cities. It hides in contracts signed by universities that claim to care about inclusion. It is public and private, visible and invisible, and always expanding.
The border doesn’t stop at the border.
ICE shares tech, tactics, and training with local police across the U.S., especially in Black and Brown communities. The same algorithms used to deport migrants are used to lock up teenagers in Chicago, LA, and New York. The war economy is domestic, too.
Migration Is Not a Crisis; U.S. Policy Is
The people being detained and deported are not a crisis. They are the result of one. U.S. foreign policy, through sanctions, coups, climate extraction, and economic warfare, has destabilized entire regions and then criminalized those who flee.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Venezuela.
Years of U.S. sanctions have severely constrained Venezuela’s economy and pushed millions to migrate. A recent study in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral economic sanctions lead to an estimated 564,000 deaths every year, mostly among children under five. The researchers concluded that sanctions are a form of economic warfare with deadly consequences, often as destructive as armed conflict. Venezuela is among the countries most severely affected.
A Stark Contrast: Venezuela’s Efforts to Reunite Families
Despite being locked out of international markets, denied access to its own reserves, and targeted by ongoing U.S. sanctions, the Venezuelan government has prioritized reuniting families separated by deportation. Flights have been organized to return Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. and neighboring countries. Deportees are met with medical care, housing support, and assistance. There are no billion-dollar detention centers. No ankle monitors. No private contractors. Just the political decision to bring people home with dignity.
This reflects a deeper difference. The United States continues to expand a war economy, one that profits from incarceration, surveillance, and militarized borders. Corporations like Palantir, CoreCivic, and GEO Group are major beneficiaries of immigration funding, alongside weapons manufacturers and data firms. In contrast, Venezuela’s response, under siege, has been to build on a peace economy rooted in social programs, community organization, and everyday resilience.
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee.
Much of that work is led by women.
In Venezuela, Madres Víctimas del Fascismo have been organizing alongside the government to locate, support, and repatriate their children, many of whom were detained in the U.S. or in Latin American countries. These mothers have worked with consular authorities, spoken in public forums, and demanded state action to bring their families back together. Through their pressure, and the government’s cooperation, some have already seen their children return home.
This is what a peace economy looks like, one built on social programs, community organization, and state-supported reunification.
The Violence of the Border Enforcement Is the Violence of the Empire
The United States fuels crises abroad—sanctions, coups, austerity—and then builds cages for those who flee. Venezuela knows this intimately. Its economy has been blocked, its institutions targeted, and its people criminalized the moment they cross a border. And yet it was Venezuela that welcomed deported migrants with food, medicine, and housing; they were greeted with care. A country labeled a dictatorship offered what this so-called democracy did not: return, reunification, and dignity.
Who Is Complicit?
This system doesn’t operate in just one region. It’s not limited to Texas or Arizona. It’s embedded across the country, in contracts, databases, and quiet forms of cooperation.
Schools often share data, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Universities collaborate with DHS through software licensing and research grants. Investors, including public pension funds and university endowments, hold shares in GEO Group, Palantir, and other deportation profiteers.
The U.S. has made its priorities clear. It is willing to spend more to detain migrants than to house the hundreds of thousands living unhoused on the streets of its cities. It is expanding detention while limiting legal avenues for relief. It is responding to the consequences of its foreign policy with policing not accountability.
It’s not enough to say “Abolish ICE.” We must hold accountable every institution that feeds its machinery, from schools that share data, to universities that license surveillance tech, to investors profiting from migrant detention.
Migration is not a crime. U.S. sanctions are.
- End institutional cooperation with ICE
- Demand divestment from companies profiting off detention
- Organize against U.S. sanctions and intervention
The war economy is everywhere. So the resistance must be, too.
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How to Speak up for Medicaid This August
This summer, you have a rare opportunity to help save American democracy by advocating against the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s mega-bill.
Aug 01, 2025
As members of Congress return to their districts for what is traditionally called the August congressional recess, Republican members will be working overtime to sell their constituents on the benefits of the Trump mega-bill (technically the “One Big Beautiful Bill”).
Republicans know well that this August will determine the outcome of the crucial 2026 midterm elections. In a memo from the Republican National Campaign Committee (NRCC) obtained by Politico, GOP members of Congress were advised that:
While the election is still more than a year away, this August in-district work period is an opportunity to go home and sell your work to your constituents. With the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law by President Trump just a few weeks ago, this is a critical opportunity to continue to define how this legislation will help every voter and push back on Democrat fearmongering.
The NRCC memo advises GOP members of Congress not to let Democrats define the agenda on Medicaid by stressing public support for eliminating waste and fraud and by instituting work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. Polling suggests that Republicans have their work cut out for them. Research conducted for The Wall Street Journal found that:
The findings show Republicans’ challenges in selling the law’s benefits as they try to hold their slim control of the House and Senate in next year’s midterm elections, and the poll demonstrates how Democrats might be able to capitalize on voters’ skepticism to stage a comeback. Overall, the law drew 42% support and 52% opposition, performing slightly worse than Trump himself in the poll. It generated negative marks from 94% of Democrats, 12% of Republicans, and 54% of independents.
On the other side of the call, The Wall Street Journal research shows there is support for work requirements and increased checks on Medicaid eligibility. Furthermore, as always, there is support for tax cuts. Much will depend on how the issues are framed. Right now, there is a lot of blank space for Democrats or Republicans to work with. Polling from CNN finds that only 27% say that they have been following debate over U.S. President Donald Trump’s mega-bill “very closely.”
In these times, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and that there is little or nothing that one person can do to make a difference. Nothing could be further from the truth. This August you have a rare opportunity to help save American democracy by speaking out against the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s mega-bill. Reach out to your member of Congress and find out how you can attend a town meeting and speak out in support of Medicaid. If your member of Congress is not holding a town meeting, stop by their district office and share your concerns with congressional staff. Trust me as a former congressional district office staffer, your presence will be noted.
If you have never gone to a congressional town meeting or met with a member of Congress, it can be intimidating. There is no need to be nervous. Remember that they work for you! Here are some simple tips that might be helpful:
- Remind your member of Congress that according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicaid pays for the care of fully 60% of patients in nursing homes.
- Tell your member of Congress that according to the American Hospital Association, 40% of all the births in this country are paid for by Medicaid.
- Convey the real-world impact of what cuts to Medicaid would be. Do not fall into the trap of defending Medicaid as a government program. Instead, talk about anyone you know who relies on Medicaid. If you rely on Medicaid, you should share that. Polling data shows that fully 60% of Americans know someone who depends on Medicaid. The more personal you make the issue of Medicaid, the more effective you will be.
- If you live in a rural area, tell your member of Congress that their vote for the Trump mega-bill will hurt your local hospital. According to the National Rural Health Association, “the bill will limit access to care for all rural patients by ending healthcare coverage for rural residents nationwide and putting financial strain on rural facilities who care for them.” Do not talk about rural hospitals in general, talk about your local hospital and why it is important.
- Provide the “why” in your Medicaid advocacy. Tell your member of Congress that you know that Medicaid is being cut to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
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We Need a New Punctuation Mark to Catch the Essence of Trumpian Decline
What we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
Aug 01, 2025
Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future.
I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that’s not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of—and this is the word he uses—“evil.” Once upon a time, this would have been inconceivable even in your wildest all-(un)-American dreams! Not a shot in hell of a chance! Never!
Until, of course, it happened (yes, twice).
And indeed, I have to repeat that “once upon a time” because the American past, however grim in all too many periods of our history, now seems something like a dark fairy tale to me. A distinctly “once upon a time” creation.
It really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline.
Having just turned 81 myself, I wonder what world I’m now really living in and how, in that very same world, any of us could ever have ended up here. Sometimes I try to imagine telling my parents about—I have the urge to capitalize this word but can’t quite bring myself to do it, so italics will have to do—him. My mother was a professional caricaturist for an endless string of newspapers and magazines, and she drew, among other grim figures in this country and on this planet, Sen. Joe McCarthy, a distinctly Trumpian character from her moment. The difference being that he was just a senator, not the president of the United States. And he was able to do his damnedest (and that’s definitely the word for it) for only a few grim years before the Senate censured him and he essentially drank himself to death. And yet, having lived through presidents from Theodore Roosevelt when she was born in 1907 to Jimmy Carter in the year of her death in 1977, I have no doubt that Donald Trump would have left her speechless (or do I mean pen or pencil-less?).
My father, at age 35, immediately joined the U.S. Air Force after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and served in Burma during World War II. Even though he was, like my mother, a Democrat, he would have found someone who got out of the U.S. military in wartime thanks to fake “bone spurs” almost unimaginable as president. And that would have only been the first of an endless list of Trumpian things that my mom and dad, not to speak of more or less anyone else of their generation, would have found unbelievable in an American president. Even Ronald Reagan (and that’s no small “even”) seemed like a reasonably sane president by comparison.
It’s hard for me to imagine how I would tell either of them about President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that’s cutting so much, including medical care, for so many Americans at the bottom of the political spectrum in order to give a $975 billion tax break to the wealthiest 1% of us. Or as he put it, “I said to one guy, he’s a very, very unattractive man, but he’s smart and he’s rich, and I said, ‘You better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’”
Red-Tie Decline
And yet, believe it or not, here we are as August begins in 2025, six months into Donald Trump’s manic second term in office and ever deeper in the Trumpian swamp.
And prepare yourself. There’s really no way to write about this American world of ours without exclamation points! In fact, in some fashion, the exclamation point isn’t faintly enough for this moment. Perhaps what we in these all-too-dis-United States of America now truly need is to invent some far wilder form of punctuation to catch the essence of this moment!!! (Three exclamation points are certainly apt, but they don’t really work, do they?) Maybe, in fact, what we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
And let me make one small instant correction to my first paragraph here: Honestly, it really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline. And not, mind you, just the decline of the United States—though that’s certainly significant enough—but of the planet itself.
Yes, in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the last vestiges of the Cold War ended with the U.S. becoming this planet’s “sole superpower,” there were certainly thinkers who already sensed that someday, somewhere along the line, like any great imperial power, this country was bound to enter a path of decline. After all, what great power in history hadn’t done so sooner or later and, in the process, had some idiot or idiots run the show for a while?
Still, let’s face it, there’s decline and then there’s DECLINE (followed, of course, by several red ties). And Donald DECLINE (red tie, red tie) Trump has offered us a path down that simply couldn’t be more uniquely his. I doubt that anyone in the history of imperial power has ever both personalized and personified decline in quite such a… well, deeply, madly personal and unbearably convincing fashion.
Planetary Decline in the Age of Trump
And give him credit, he’s able to do it so much more convincingly because of his advanced age. After all, his second time around, he is indeed—offer him record-setting credit here (red tie)—the oldest president ever to take office in two and a half centuries of all-American history. In other words, in the next three years and five months, we’ll clearly be able to watch not just this 21st century imperial power of an almost unimaginable sort—consider, for instance, those 750 or so U.S. military bases that still span this globe of ours—or our 79-year-old president both decline in an up close and personal fashion, but our planet do so as well. And that’s something new in human history.
Never in the past has the Earth itself been on such a precipitous path downward. And before Donald Trump is done (or do I mean, like the rest of us aging creatures, done in?), given his attitude toward climate change, he may manage to take not just this country but the planet down with him. No small feat (and, believe me, I don’t mean feet or even bone spurs here [red tie]) when you think about it. (As a matter of fact, thinking about Donald D. Trump is, in every sense, a declinist activity[red tie].)
It’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too.
I mean from those devastating floods in Texas on the Fourth of July weekend, the deadliest inland flooding in this country in almost half a century, to the record-setting, never-ending mega-drought across the American Southwest, to those flooded subway stations in my hometown of New York, climate change is increasingly being felt by Americans of every sort. (It’s mid-summer and I’m sweating as I write this amid a striking heatwave across the Eastern U.S.) Climate change was certainly visible in the staggering temperatures that hit Europe this June, leading to an unexpectedly high death toll, and the horrifying wildfires that have recently ravaged parts of Greece and Turkey; the extensive flooding and other natural disasters in China; and the devastation of every sort it’s been causing in Africa. And that’s just to start down a list that certainly would have to include the Arctic, which may now be heating up four times faster than the global average.
Mind you, none of that should truly be surprising, since this year the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has peaked above 430 parts per million. That’s the highest it’s estimated to have been in millions of years, according to data recently released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And overall, it’s estimated that, in the last year alone, climate change has added an extra 30 days of extreme heat for more than 4 billion people globally. Think about that for a moment, take a breath, and make sure you’re not overdressed.
And the Trump response to all of this? Among other things, to open Alaska’s wilderness areas more fully to oil and natural gas drilling and mining. Brilliant, no?
Trump Him (Red Tie)
All of that undoubtedly only makes Donald D. Trump all that much prouder. After all, he’s the man (or do I mean: The Man?). And imagine this: The country that was already the historically largest emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide is, under him, certain to retain that title for the (un)foreseeable future.
Of course, he invariably has an urge to be the ultimate record holder in anything. After all, he’s going all out to cut funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and NOAA that might have been used to deal in some fashion with climate change’s potential devastation in this country. As The New York Times recently reported, “In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.”
In his Big Beautiful Budget, he’s been ready to cut so much that matters to this country. Yet the soaring trillion-dollar military budget he’ll preside over (whatever its other problems, including its staggering cost for American taxpayers) will only add to the planetary mayhem by making the U.S. military “the 38th largest emitter [of carbon] in the world if it were its own nation.” And don’t forget the Trumpian-induced science brain drain from this country that’s now underway.
And yet here’s the strange thing (or rather one of all too many strange things): among the Trumpian—and yes, on this planet at this moment in this country, he’s certainly a noun, a verb, an adjective, and undoubtedly an adverb, too—wildness and disastrous acts being covered in the media, it’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too. In a sense, in fact, one thing Donald Trump has proven particularly skilled at is removing attention of any sort from climate change.
Yes, who doesn’t know that, among other things, he once called it a “Chinese hoax”? And it seems to matter not at all to him that, at this very moment, this planet is heating up in a record-setting fashion. Of course, I’ve been writing about just that reality repeatedly because it repeatedly stops me short.
Still, to this day, I can’t understand how 49.8% of American voters found Donald Trump appealing enough to elect him president (again!) in 2024. And of course, we’re talking about the guy who is reportedly dreaming about not running for but just being president a third time around—to hell with the Constitution. His backers have already produced a “Trump 2028” red cap, and he’s told some of them that it would be “the greatest honor of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times” (only later claiming that he was joking).
Don’t you have the urge to call George Orwell back from the dead to write a Trumpian sequel to 1984? Perhaps 2026? And speaking of bringing back the dead, if only I could bring back my parents and let my mother do her ultimate devastating caricature of Donald D. Trump.
However it happens, he really does need to be trumped before he Trumps us all off this planet and global bankruptcy becomes us.
Trump him (red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie).
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